Meet the winner of the WIRED Health 2017 Startup Stage

Thirteen startups came from across the globe to pitch for ten minutes to three judges – Pamela Spence, Global Life Science industry leader at EY, Hakim Yadi, CEO of Northern Health Science Alliance, and Liat Clark, WIRED's commissioning editor - for the chance to speak on the main stage, to a room packed with WIRED Health delegates and speakers. The prize has held previous winners in good stead: last year’s winner, virtual nurse app Sense.ly, raised $8 million in a Series B round of venture funding in February.

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While 2016’s pitching sessions were abundant with apps, this year there was a focus on hardware and machine learning, and a continuation of a trend we have seen for some years now: placing control back into the hands of patients through technology.

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When co-founder and CMO Devika Wood was ten years old, she began a 12-year-long career as an informal carer for her grandmother. Aside from the emotional and physical toll that can have on a person so young, it highlighted to Wood just how much the social care industry needed to be rebooted, as she watched a total of 150 carers come and go over the years. With Vida, she is doing just that.

Slated as the first company to bring technology into the at-home care industry, it delivers “logistics and matching” solutions. Matching refers to its algorithm, which takes into account location, disease expertise, and more to suggest five carers to a client. The logistics part means it provides all the backend data carers and clients need to ensure continuity of care - Wood’s grandmother became severely disabled as a result of the interaction between two drugs administered by different people in the social services chain. Vida wants to avoid this kind of simple, yet ultimately tragic mistake by ensuring it hires highly qualified, well-paid carers, and syncs up all the care data in an app so everything is transparent. The idea is social services and clients know where their money is being spent, and can track patient outcomes.

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Right now, says Wood, there is no real cap on what agencies can charge, and they are being paid around £21 for 30-minute visits, with carers receiving just £8 before travel expenses. “It doesn’t seem fathomable that as a nation we’ve admitted the lowest qualified, lowest paid people can look after our loved ones,” says Wood. Because of the admin costs Vida can cut out by using technology and making the system more efficient, it can charge £15 per hour and pay carers £11.50-13.50.

Data is streamed through the system to Vida offices and client's apps in real time, so family members can even see when a carer has arrived thanks to iBeacon tech. Vida wants to eventually sync its backend with other devices, like glucose monitoring systems, to ensure proactive care is provided at all times.

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Half of all adult mental health problems have their root in childhood. So how can we intervene earlier to prevent this from happening? BfB labs says we should be engaging youngsters where they are already spending their time - video games. The average 13-year-old spends six hours a week playing games., but telling a teenager to play a game that is good for their mental wellbeing is not a great sell. Instead, BfB labs has created a game that has a particularly unique selling point entirely separate from health - biofeedback. Gamers take on the guise of a spellcaster who has to control their magic by managing their heart rate, monitored via a wearable that comes with the game. The “emotional responsive gaming” responds to a player’s physiology and rewards them for improving their emotional state.

“Focusing on your body’s responses, clearing your mind and gathering your attention are things you can imagine a real spellcaster doing in order to get a real power,” says Simon Fox, design director at BfB Labs. It will, says Fox, help children and teenagers “build core emotional management skills and help them learn the vital lesson that difficult emotions needn’t be catastrophic events”. “These years as you grow into an adult are a crucial moment for the determination of your long-term mental health - learning and developing behaviours that will protect you from ill health in the future… The ability to adapt to new or adverse conditions without stress or suffering protects against the negative effects of stress on mental health and is associated, in literature, with a lower likelihood of developing mental illness.”

BfB Labs has carried out five trials in schools, with 10-90 players at each. Three in four players (aged ten to 15) said it helped them remain calm and focused. Feedback was positive, saying the wearables made the game feel real. The startup has raised $80,000 in a crowdfunding campaign and plans to bring it to app stores in June. Although judges were concerned the startup seems aimed at boys, they decided to give it a special commendation for the unique premise and potential impact.

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In 2016, 259,000 health apps hit the market. It’s an overwhelming number. But many of these won’t pitch themselves strictly as medical or health apps, but wellbeing offerings. Why? The costly and burdensome process of validating clinical data to become approved as a health app. AppAttic, which specialises in building health apps that rely on heavy loads of data - Bitrun, for instance, uses Fitbit activity data to create a personalised ‘running’ game - wants to remedy this with a new service.

“There was no fast, simple end-to-end solution,” says co-founder and CEO Rachel Gawley. “I want my team to continue to make great interventions, then be able to slot in validation.” In the early days of app development, Gawley built a tool that would allow anyone to build an app easily. “I like to take really complex tech and processes and make it very very simple.” Now, she has built an end-to-end online clinical trial builder. Outpeek requires anyone with a health app to have an initial research protocol, then AppAttic does the rest, assuring data is anonymised and abides by privacy laws in the UK and Ireland.

“We can validate faster; get health benefits sooner; save time and money.” AppAttic has clinicians on its team helping craft the business, as well as former CEO of Microsoft Ventures.

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There are 7,000 rare diseases in the world, with five more identified every week; 75 per cent of those affected, will be children. These were the overwhelming and troubling statistics founder and CEO Elin Haf Davies shared with the audience. On top of this, 42 per cent of related drugs trials end with inconclusive results. Davies wants to help speed up the development of drugs to combat these diseases, by harnessing the power of data and wearables.

“The biggest problem is that children with rare diseases have very good days and very bad days, and it’s unfair that scheduled visits don’t capture what’s in between.” Patients and their parents are motivated to share data, if it will help physicians learn more about the disease, she said. Aparito, is the answer, capturing daily stats from wearable sensors on the patient’s condition and any incidents such as seizures, and logging these in an accompanying app. Information such as local pollution and temperature will be automatically pulled in, and patients and carers can record when medication is taken and all outcomes or side effects in the app. The app is currently undergoing three trials in the UK, one in India and one in the US.

“This data provides more of the objective, passive data that is contextualised in the app,” said Davies. Those patterns of data are interpreted with the help of algorithms built by Davies’ colleague, who has 30 years of experience in artificial intelligence in academia and the pharmaceutical industry. “We can replace some of the tests required in hospital, and add value for the patient and pharma. My belief is that to achieve personalised medicine we must integrate personalised monitoring.”